Jesus

So another shooter shoots up a shopping mall. You can call him a stupid teenage prick, you can call him a soldier of whatever, you can call him another brainwashed victim of the curse of Religion… but in fact he was a human being who made a connection.

To negation.

So what is your connection? Coz if you don’t chose you will get chosen.

Jesus talked about ‘blessed are the spiritually poor, blessed are the humble.’ Nietzsche hated that shit, he thought Christianity was a Roman slave cult. What’s my connection? Is it to fucking, is it drugs, is it to my idea of my country, my village? Is it to God?

Tillich talked about the God above Religion. God is above Religion. We are above Religion, this earthly organisation is there to support us, to act as an enabler, as a protagonist. Once we connect to Religion, once we worship Religion we start worshipping an idol.

But that makes things harder for us. We have to think for ourselves. We have to grow our own legs, get up and stop being lame, thinking we are lame. That’s where the teaching on the mountain comes in… blessed are the spiritually poor, the unproud, the people who can honestly say ‘I don’t know. But this is my best guess…’

Once we say we do know, once we have certainty, once we are right and everyone else is wrong and an unbeliever, then we have hell on earth.

We’ve had days, weeks, years, centuries, millennia of hatred. You can dress it up in whatever disguise you like: religion, nationalism, football teams, whatever, its so damn easy to hate, particularly if you feel you are the victim.

Hate goes down real easy, it feels good, but the hangover hurts like hell. The obvious solution? Hair of the dog – more hate.

Forgiveness? Impossible surely. How can you forgive someone who kills, who hurts, who causes pain to another.

The problem is we just pass the pain on.

That’s when we turn around and say ‘Fuck you, God.’ Usually we follow that up with a prayer.

But in the words of Saint Paul of Tallaght, ‘Daddy’s Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car.’ And he does and he has.

I was reading ‘The God Delusion’ as RD sets up and systematically demolishes every claimed proof for the existence of the Big Man in the sky. Richard Dawkins states in the Preface that ‘if this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down. What presumptuous optimism! Of course, dyed -in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument.’

In Norman Maclean’s book ‘A River Runs Through It’ the first line states ‘In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing.’ Nowhere is this more beautifully expressed than in the description of Norman’s last fishing trip with his brother, Paul. Norman watches as his brother fishes for the ‘big fish.’ Norman asks Paul how he figured out where to cast. ‘All there is to thinking,’ Paul says, ‘is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren’t noticing which makes you see something that isn’t even visible.’

I was walking through York with my family and I saw one of those Hell-fire preachers with the placard around his neck calling all people to repentance – the kind of idiot that persuades the undecided that dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument. Two boys were kneeling before him – taking the piss – laughing and asking him to show God to them. It was all thoroughly depressing.

I walked back to my car thinking – show me God, prove you to me. Then I walked past Clifford’s Tower. For those of you unfamiliar with York, England, Clifford’s Tower is a tourist attraction and the site of one this nation’s greatest crimes – namely the 1190 massacre of the town’s Jewish population. There it was, a reminder of the will to power, of all the dark shit that hides inside the heart, soul, cerebral cortex of every man, woman and child. Don’t tell me times have changed, they haven’t. Were still capable of this – just look at newspapers around the world this very day.

I saw the Will 2 Power, and as I saw the Will to Power I willed for the Will to Love. I saw something noticeable which made me see something I previously hadn’t noticed which drew my attention to something I cannot see.’

Is this a proof that would be acceptable to the dyed-in-the-wool fact-heads? What presumptuous optimism.

The Will to Power is real. The Will to Love is real. Each of us, me included, has to choose , minute by minute, hour by hour, which one of these defines our life. Science has nothing to do with it. Religion has nothing to do with it. It is a personal decision; the courage to be … as Tillich would describe it.

I don’t think Jesus was a big C Christian. When he said I am the way, the truth, the life, and no-one gets to the Father except through me, I think he was telling it straight. I loath toxic Christians, in the same way as I loath any form of certainty. I admire those people of all Faiths and Nations whose will to love is central to their lives. They know the way to the Noun is through the Verb.

That’s how we stop the Clifford’s Towers springing up across this dangerous planet of ours, by not building them first within our own hearts.